Posted
by
timothy
on Sunday March 06, 2011 @04:02PM
from the futbol-must-prevail dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A local court has banned Google's Blogger service in Turkey in response to a complaint by satellite TV firm Digiturk that streaming media feeds from local soccer games were appearing on multiple Blogger profiles. Unsurprisingly, Google criticized the move, given that everyone is suffering over a few people's illegal actions. Copyright holders should target the individuals that are distributing the infringing content via an established complaints procedure rather than having the parent site banned. An estimated 600,000 Turks use the service to blog about anything from daily ramblings, to hobbies, to keeping their readers updated with the news."

Is the Turkish government merely twitchy about precious, precious "IP", or is this somewhat more like China, where external web services get blocked more or less at random in no small part because the government wishes to encourage use of some local competitor?

If the former, this seems like it could be counterproductive: beyond any considerations of "justice" or "proportionality", the (cynical, pragmatic) justification for targeted enforcement is that it keeps average-joe-on-the-

More than likely this is somebody just using a host of Google Blogger accounts and despairing of chasing them down (and perhaps unable to get Google to provide the real identifying information), the Turkish court decided to just say no to Google because that would be the only way to get them to listen.

The one thing Google never seems to recognize is that evil can be in the eye of the beholder.

I don't know about their IP laws, but Turkey does have a somewhat strained relationship with political speech - it's theoretically well protected, and broadly speaking, dissenting opinions are published more or less freely, but it's not especially unusual for those espousing the opinions to end up in court over it.

It's actually a very good 'slippery slope' example for those of us in the west to point out - under the veil of copyright protection, speech is severely curtailed, and this in a country which can only just get away with it. This isn't something people can write off as "It won't happen here" like the gross abuses in Saudi Arabia or China, this is a very real threat to free speech even in countries where it's more strongly protected.

That's nothing about the free speech or something. It's purely about copyright infringement, and Google doesn't do its work to block such an abusive content.

US is much more strict in that sense.
OTOH, just because it's "blog" it doesn't mean it's about a page people share their opinions, vast majority of those blocks include the pirated content or links to them even worse with advertisement.

You seem to have missed the point - they didn't just block the alleged infringing content, the blocked the entire Google Blogger service; that's 600,000 people's speech blocked from view by the government because a few broke the law. I'd say that's very much a free speech issue, and your post is an excellent example of how their attempts to imply it's a simple copyright case are working.

Do you have any idea how hard is to block part of a web site from a distributed server? Should they check the whole data which people downloading and filter only the certain 'html' code? Isn't it more harmful for free speech? I don't want anyone to monitor data I'm downloading from any server. It's duty of Google to block those content, but they didn't according to the owner of complaint, since they tried to convince Google first to remove that content. I guess Google was happy with that content due to the

Do you have any idea how hard is to block part of a web site from a distributed server? Should they check the whole data which people downloading and filter only the certain 'html' code? Isn't it more harmful for free speech? I don't want anyone to monitor data I'm downloading from any server.

I really don't think they should be blocking any content at all, and any method they do try to use is almost guaranteed to be breakable - the only real question is how hard it is to break. That said, I'm sure blocking the URL of the relevant blog or blogs at the DNS level would be about the same difficulty, and effectiveness, as blocking the whole of Blogger.

It's duty of Google to block those content, but they didn't according to the owner of complaint, since they tried to convince Google first to remove that content.

No, it isn't. If companies start yanking content based on the laws of countries other than those where their servers are located, whose laws should the

I really don't think they should be blocking any content at all, and any method they do try to use is almost guaranteed to be breakable - the only real question is how hard it is to break. That said, I'm sure blocking the URL of the relevant blog or blogs at the DNS level would be about the same difficulty, and effectiveness, as blocking the whole of Blogger.

Blocking URL's at DNS level is pretty hard. DNS blocking is the easiest (and the least efficient) way to block content. Different URLs of the same site would resolve to same IP so you can't block a certain URL at DNS level easily (you still need prior monitoring if you want to do that.). Besides, why should anyone care a product of a company that doesn't do that themselves?

No, it isn't. If companies start yanking content based on the laws of countries other than those where their servers are located, whose laws should they draw the line at? Sweden? Turkey? Saudi Arabia?

If you can manage to distinguish users based on their geographical location for your income generating advertisement network, for sure y

Thinking further, a few more relevant points come to mind: by your own argument, people can replicate the same content on other servers - why won't the infringing content come back just as easily as the rest? It wasn't even Blogger hosting the files, they were just linked to, so making those few links available again is not exactly difficult - certainly much easier than making hundreds of thousands of blogs (and all the associated community and commenting) available elsewhere.

Google could easily block the content, and give out the IPs of the users of their page, so copyright owners would fight with those infringing their copyrights. Once Google back those, that means they are protecting those against laws (for more ad revenue). Even if it's for political reasons, I don't think corporations have any right to impose their own morals to nations. This is my country, these laws were written by those I elected, and I trust them much more than any foreign organization running for-profi

I'm against non-sense censorship as well. But I wish in this kind of situation, *all* Google products to be blocked (including Google Search Engine), if Google does not change its arrogant behavior. This is not censorship in a known sense. Once they would see that they will lose such a market and other sites would stop using Google for their services, they would do their auto-control more efficient. I don't understand, how someone do accept idea of a company to have its own 'laws' in your own country just b

If they want to block the content, they should block the server streaming the live games. No infringing content was being hosted by the blogger service. Furthermore, there IS a complaints process to ban the violaters, which was not followed. Finally, this isn't about google. It could have been any other blogging service, or even one of those free web hosts.

This law turkey has, like many laws being made these days, doesn't reflect technical realities. If there was a drug dealer living in an apartment, you sh

The process in Turkey works like this: Someone goes to court claiming a web site at a certain URL and/or IP is doing something forbidden (copyright infringements are just one example.) The court checks whether the claim is true and if it is, whether the service provider removes it once notified. If the claim is true and the service provider is unwilling to remove the offending content the URL name and/or IP block is forbidden. While the courts can decide whether or not ban a site, they don't have options to

Australia is working on a filter to block "Unwanted Content" (Yes, that's what our government calls it) and the United States is looking at having the ability to kill the internet should it threaten the ruling government.

For better or worse, Blogger is a US company. Had they sent it a DMCA notice, it would have been upheld. Of course, it's always easier to censor stuff when you have something like COICA already in place!

I don't want my tax money to be spent on some juridical inspection to find abusive content, and prepare infrastructure to block exactly that. That's the *duty* of provider, and in this case provider is Google. I don't know if Google would be happy if someone rip their for-profit online applications and sell them, we've already seen how offensive they were when their authentication system source code was leaked. Hypocritically if it's IP of someone else they just *don't care* with freedom lies. That's far f

You're absolutely correct, in retrospect I should have said judges who see no outlook beyond whats in the case in front of them, with a narrow world view who don't understand that with new technology, their actions and decisions can have a much far greater reach than they realize. Better?

This all sounds fishy. Blogger has no mechanism to host streaming media. It integrates well with youtube and picasa, but neither of those could show you live games, both respond to takedown notices, and neither was targeted by this.

Our local courts and judges are very ignorant about cumputer and internet releated stuff and our laws are very very flexible about cencorship. You can close about any site with those.
Bad thing is, all of those streaming blogs are getting it from justin.tv and embed it to their blogs. And they're closing blogger, not justin.tv. They are that stupid.
It doesn't matter though. Everybody knows how to change their dns settings, or to use proxy. We memorized it when youtube closed for 3 years.

As you remember from the slashdot articles of the time, there is an internet censorship board which is directly tied to the prime minister, and which is also able to censor websites without any court order, if they are deemed 'dangerous or harmful' for the culture or 'youth'. the ruling party's own president's office had detected that 6,000 websites or so were censored totally without court order, despite the claims of the censorship board to not have censored anything without a court order.